So far, allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT) is the only well established and proven curative cellular therapy for patients suffering from cancer. This is demonstrated by the observation that long term remissions can be in particular achieved with allo-SCT in patients with “poor-risk” leukaemia. However, cure comes at a price of severe toxicity, resulting in an overall mortality of approximately 30% of treated patients. This hampers broad clinical implementation as in particular patients with low risk cancers might have a good overall survival not justifying such aggressive therapies. The ultimate goal remains therefore the development of a non-aggressive transplantation method. This means the generation of cellular products equipped with molecular features that allow selective targeting of the cancer cell while preserving healthy tissues. This would allow a curative treatment to a large number of patients with medical need, irrespective of age.
To engineer a transplant, which may be allogeneic or autologous, to facilitate the rapid generation of e.g. tumour-reactive αβT-cells, it has been proposed to reprogram αβT-cells with genes encoding for a tumour-specific αβT-cell receptor (TCR) or a chimeric antigen receptor. Several of such receptors are already being used to redirect αβT-cells in phase I clinical trials. However, reprogramming αβT-cells with defined αβTCRs is substantially hampered by their restriction to HLA types, limiting thereby the number of patients that can be treated with one αβ-TCR. In addition, pairing of introduced αβTCR chains with endogenous αβTCR chains can induce life-threatening auto-reactivity.
It has been proposed to mediate a selective anti-tumour-reactivity with a high-affinity TCR using the ability of γ9δ2T-cells to mediate anti-tumour-reactivity while ignoring healthy-environment (Fisch et al., 1990, Science 250, 1269-1273). Isolated γ9δ2T-cells may efficiently kill tumour-cells of haematological malignancies and solid tumours (Kabelitz et al., 2007, Cancer Res. 67, 5-8). However, the function and proliferation capacity of γ9δ2T-cells is frequently heavily impaired in cancer patients making autologous γ9δ2T-cells less attractive for immune interventions.
It has been proposed to transfer a defined γ9δ2TCR into αβT-cells, which mediates a tumour-specific proliferation of αβT-cells and redirects both effector CD8+ and helper CD4+ αβT-cell subsets against a broad panel of tumour-cell-lines while normal cells in vitro and in vivo may be ignored (Marcu-Malina et al., 2011, Blood 118, 50-59). However, little knowledge is available about how γ9δ2TCRs mediate different activity against tumour cells and what strategy needs to be used to isolate γ9δ2TCRs with high activity against cancer cells.
Hence, there is need in the art to provide for γ9δ2TCRs with high activity against cancer cells and there is a need in the art to provide for improved methods for selecting such highly active γ9δ2TCRs.